Subscription-based streaming services is a big market. In the USA, e-book stream business sales are approximately four (4) billion dollars in 2015 and as much as fifteen (15) billion dollars globally. Google, Inc. of Mountain, Calif. has scanned more than thirty (30) million books for Google library; Internet Archive is digitizing ancient East Asia books; Fujitsu, Inc. of Tokyo, Japan is scanning three hundred thousand (300,000) Ancient Chinese books for Shanxi Library and, other digitizing vendors are targeting 2,500,000 ancient Chinese books.
Scanned images may be either delivered directly as an e-book image stream service or converted to textural documents for information processing. Thus, users have options to access scanned images or read converted textual documents through subscribed e-book stream services. Although scanned images of old books can be converted into text using technologies (such as Optical Text Recognition, or “OCR”), in certain cases, the scanned images of the books are preferred for their originality and authenticity. For example, historians and archaeologists may prefer to get first hand materials in their original from, i.e., an image, for the purposes of research and study.